The Exile

by Adrian Levy

  After two weeks and with fourteen possible locations, Grenier made a decision to hit them all simultaneously. It would be a complex operation requiring considerable political support from Islamabad—and Washington—so Grenier sent his deputy Dave to lobby members of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence who happened to be visiting Pakistan. Martinez, accompanied by Jennifer Keenan, the FBI’s legal attaché, estimated their chances were fifty-fifty: odds that further down the road would shut down an operation like this. However, in need of results right now, Grenier thought the chances good enough.

  March 29, 2002, 1:20 A.M., Canal Road, Faisal Town, Faisalabad, Pakistan

  Exhausted after a long day’s digging, Shafiq Ghani, an agricultural laborer, had gone to bed early, looking forward to an uninterrupted night’s sleep as his wife and children were away. But he was woken by voices out in the street.10

  The clattering around was unusual for this quiet, new development, and when he looked through his gate, he was frightened to see heavily armed police officers, Punjab Rangers—and several Westerners in cargo pants, including a woman, standing in the road.

  “There are people living here,” he called out nervously, worried about being injured in a shoot-out.

  Two Rangers stomped over and pushed him back inside his courtyard. “Keep out of the way,” they hissed.

  Shafiq began praying as the police piled into his neighbor’s ugly gray cement villa, a building called Shahbaz Cottage but that resembled a bullion vault protected by barbed wire and spikes. Shafiq had watched as eight young, clean-shaven men had recently taken up residence. Initially, he had presumed they were students, but when they draped curtains over all the windows and doors and made canopies from rugs to cover outside spaces, he had begun to worry. One of them never went out, although Shafiq overheard him speaking.

  At one thirty A.M., the Rangers broke through the gate of Shahbaz Cottage and piled in. Shafiq heard a fierce gun battle start up almost immediately as furniture was tossed about. Men screamed. Others cursed and threatened. Inside Shahbaz Cottage, Constable Mubashir of the Punjab police was wrestling with three men armed with kitchen knives who stabbed him in the neck and back as six of his comrades rushed upstairs.11

  Shafiq heard running footsteps over the flat rooftops and counted a dozen shots. He opened a window and saw blood dripping down the walls. He heard an American woman shouting in English: “Stop firing!” He crept outside and watched as five injured men were slung into a police pickup, along with three limp corpses.

  The Americans clustered around their haul with flashlights, taking photographs and recording video, a practice that Jennifer Keenan had introduced on all raids to ensure transparency. She also used the pictures to compile a database, just as the FBI had done with the Mafia. Now, as everyone stood over the blood-spattered haul, the Americans debated what they had.

  One by one they inspected the prisoners, reaching the most seriously injured last: a heavy, clean-shaven man with a square jaw and mop of wild, corkscrew hair.

  “It could be him,” Shafiq heard an American agent say.

  Another disagreed.

  A third produced a camera. Someone else produced the Zubaydah mug shots that had created confusion. The man lying prone before them was much larger, and his face, although now bloated and flecked with blood, looked completely different. But then again, according to Hesham Abu Zubaydah, the photographs were wrong.

  Shot in the thigh, with shrapnel wounds in his groin and stomach, the suspect was bleeding profusely.

  A decision was taken to keep him alive in case he was Zubaydah, and he was flown under police escort to a Pakistani military hospital, where one of several CIA agents who took turns sitting watch became so concerned about the lack of security that he tied the prisoner to the bed with a sheet. As word spread that Abu Zubaydah had possibly been arrested, the Pakistanis “started bringing in V.I.P.s just to gawk at him,” the former agent recalled.12

  Over the next twenty-four hours, the prisoner slipped in and out of consciousness. “When he was able to speak, it was practically breathless,” the agent recalled. “Our conversations were very short. The first thing he said—he was clearly out of it—was to ask for a glass of red wine.” Later, he wept and begged the American to smother him with a pillow.

  March 31, 2002, Detention Site Green, Thailand

  Hooded and immobile, the prisoner lay handcuffed to a gurney, watched by a doctor and an anesthesiologist from Johns Hopkins Hospital who had been sent over by the CIA. When the bag was ripped from his head, his eyes flickered, adjusting to the light, the left eye clouded green with an infection. He had cuts and dried blood on his face and no idea that he had been flown more than two thousand miles by private charter to a disused military camp deep in the Thai jungle.13

  The precise location of this makeshift interrogation center cum medical facility remains classified, but sources who worked on the program suggested that it was a crumbling Royal Thai Air Force facility called Ramasun.14 Developed and used as a signals station by the United States during the Vietnam War, it had lain empty for years and was overgrown with weeds. Situated deep inside the country’s northeastern Udon Thani Province, close to the border with Laos and far enough away from Bangkok for no one to question what was happening inside, it was the perfect place to hide a high-profile suspect. Those aware of its existence code-named it Cat’s Eye.15

  Only a handful of the U.S. intelligence and military personnel posted there at short notice knew who the prisoner was thought to be, while none of those who had arrested him in Pakistan had been told where he had gone. And since he was defined as an enemy combatant and not a prisoner of war, the International Committee for the Red Cross had also not been informed. Abu Zubaydah was about to be sucked into a black hole.

  When he came to, a pale-skinned FBI agent loomed over him, speaking Arabic. He acknowledged that the prisoner was in terrible shape as he read from the medical notes: “The bullet hit him in his left thigh and shattered coins in his pocket. Some of this freak shrapnel entered his abdomen.”16

  When the prisoner mustered a weak response, the FBI visitor recorded his voice, took fingerprints, swabbed his mouth for DNA, and cut a lock of hair.

  The Johns Hopkins team then sedated him before cutting open stitches to drain his wounds, warning that if they did not work fast, the wounds would become septic and, given his weak condition, probably kill him.

  Anxious, the FBI visitor placed blocks of ice on Zubaydah’s lips and, seeing that the prisoner had soiled himself, reached for a flannel, cleaning him up before dressing him in an incontinence pad.

  This was not what Special Agent Ali Soufan had planned for his Easter vacation. He had been packing for a family holiday when he got the call to assist the CIA in the interrogation of what the Bush administration hoped was America’s first High Value Detainee (HVD).

  Reaching a private airstrip at Dulles International Airport, near Washington, D.C., Soufan had been surprised to find no CIA interrogation team there, only the Johns Hopkins doctors, one of whom had never worked for the CIA before and so was taken off to a telephone booth where he was asked to sign a nondisclosure agreement.17 “No one else is coming,” a crew member told Soufan as they boarded the plane.

  The reason for the CIA’s sudden about-face was that the CTC had shown the detainee’s arrest photographs to an anonymous source in Afghanistan who told them it was not Abu Zubaydah. In Portland, his younger brother Hesham had also dismissed the photo as being another man. As far as the CIA was concerned, Ali Soufan was on a wild-goose chase.

  Now that he was in the room with the prisoner, Soufan suspected that the CIA was wrong. He was also horrified by the condition Zubaydah was in, wondering at how the CIA could have certified him as being fit to fly after forty-eight hours in intensive care. This broken-down jungle camp infested with snakes was no place for a man near death. That first night, while other members of the local CIA team, who had flown up from Bangkok, left for their ho
tel, Soufan pulled an old military cot into an adjacent room, wondering about the hall of mirrors that saw an American “fighting to keep alive a terrorist dedicated to killing Americans.”

  At three A.M., the Johns Hopkins doctor woke him. “You should ask your questions straightaway,” he urged. The prisoner had developed septicemia and would likely be dead by morning. An old shrapnel injury to his skull was also causing brain swelling. After Soufan contacted the CIA in-country team, they sent word to Langley, and a sharply worded cable came back: “Death is not an option.” The prisoner would have to be disguised and admitted into intensive care at the nearest public hospital.

  Soufan and his CIA colleagues donned U.S. military uniforms and put one on the prisoner. Posing as U.S. troops on assignment with the Royal Thai Air Force, they would, if asked, pretend that he was a fellow officer injured on a training exercise. But during the journey, Zubaydah’s condition worsened, his larynx swelling. He was suffocating, rasping, struggling for breath. The Johns Hopkins doctors performed an emergency tracheotomy, assisted by Soufan, who pumped air into the prisoner’s lungs.

  When the bloodied party arrived at the hospital in Udon Thani, a crowd gathered. “People stared, trying to understand why all these ‘American’ soldiers were wheeling in an injured and handcuffed man.” After an emergency assessment, the prisoner was put on life support.

  The delirious patient woke up and found himself surrounded by female nurses. He began jabbering, thinking they were houris (virgins) and that he was in paradise. When he saw Ali Soufan and realized he was still alive, he tried to get out of bed.

  “Don’t make a scene,” the FBI agent urged.

  While the prisoner remained on life support, Soufan spent his time going through his briefcase, recovered from Shahbaz Cottage.

  Here were bank statements, a twenty-seven-page contact book listing phone numbers and names, videos of Zubaydah praising the 9/11 attacks, and six volumes of diaries going back to 1991. Soufan was engrossed and hoped that the trove would bring them closer to Al Qaeda and its emir, his deputies, and the operatives out in the field preparing for the next round of attacks—if only he could make sense of it.

  “Who,” Soufan wondered, as he started reading the diaries “is Hani?” Many of the entries were addressed to this individual.

  Soon his pad was filled with notes, one of which he highlighted. On page eight of the phone book, a number and a partial reference to a name struck a chord: “Abu Ahmad K.”

  Soufan cross-referenced the name with the FBI database and found that it probably belonged to an Al Qaeda courier whom the CIA had been tracking since January 2002. Attention to this man had peaked when Riyadh the Facilitator (determined to distance himself from the abduction of Daniel Pearl) had named Abu Ahmad al-Kuwaiti as a bagman for Osama. If Abu Ahmad al-Kuwaiti and Abu Ahmad K were the same man, they now had his phone number, bringing them much nearer to Osama’s family, who was most possibly located in the megalopolis of Karachi.

  On April 8, the prisoner came off life support. He still could not speak because of the tracheotomy tube, so Soufan brought in an Arabic alphabet chart.18

  “Who is Abu Ahmad K?”

  “I can’t recall,” the prisoner spelled out.

  Soufan nodded. He would circle back to this. “Okay. Who is Hani?”

  Abu Zubaydah managed a smile. He pointed to himself, before explaining with the help of the alphabet chart that this was his childhood pet name and he had adopted it again when he began writing a diary in 1990. That year he had left Saudi Arabia to study computer science at a college in India—much to the annoyance of his father. Far from home, lonely and aged just nineteen, he had adopted a nom de plume, recording a view of his life in a strange land as “Hani1,” entries he planned to review ten years later with a new, wiser persona, “Hani2,” who would reflect on where life had led him.

  “Today I have decided to write my memoirs and these words to you,” Zubaydah had written in the first entry, dated June 1990. “So this will be the letter in which I complain … get things off my chest, and cry in your arms whenever I feel the need to share my burden from this silly world.” Fearing someone would read it and think him crazy, he also noted that he was not “schizophrenic” or “paranoid” but simply “reflective.”

  Back then waging jihad had been the last thing on the young Zubaydah’s mind, and his writing showed how naïve he was on his first journey away from home. Studying in the southern Indian city of Mysore, where one third of the population was Muslim, he ranted about his rude Hindu neighbors and complained about his disappointed father, who had wanted him to train as a medical doctor.

  Lonely and sexually frustrated, he also obsessed about women, dismissing them as “clay virgins … a passing evil that excite me for a moment then disappear or a wet dream that I shower after having.” He would rather hold out for the seventy-two houris waiting for him in heaven, he confided, than consign himself to what he saw as an embarrassing role in a cheap “Indian movie.”

  However, unable to hold out, he began a frustrating relationship with his maid, an Indian Christian woman called Philomena, with whom he experimented sexually, although he would not allow himself to have full intercourse. After six months of sharing a bed, Philomena, unable to understand Zubaydah, began drinking heavily. Believing that he was cheating on her, she concocted a rumor about him sleeping with the wife of his closest friend, an inflammatory allegation of adultery, a crime that according to the Indian penal code carries a five-year jail sentence.19 Arrested and investigated by the Mysore police, Zubaydah began to loathe India and by December 1990, he had decided to leave.

  In January 1991, he abandoned his studies and went with another friend to Pakistan. When they reached Peshawar, they headed for Osama bin Laden’s Services Office and then the House of Martyrs, prepared to volunteer.

  But the sight of so many amputees and war-wounded mujahideen turned Zubaydah’s stomach, as did the short-term goals of jihad. “If I become handicapped, with my leg amputated, or any other type of obstacle—God forbid! Also, what would I do if the party ends and there is no more jihad in Afghanistan! Where would I go as I have no job and no college degree? Oh, what a life!”

  By February 1991 he was in Afghanistan and had become a camp rat. “I sit down next to the fire, embracing myself,” he wrote. “It’s not sunrise, yet, and I smell the aromatic smell … and the scent of the wet wood logs as they burn … the scent of the ground and the rainwater … And I breathe and I breathe and I breathe …” Overcoming his fears, Abu Zubaydah had begun jihad training at Khaldan camp under the legendary Al Qaeda commander Ibn Sheikh: “Hani, I feel happiness … Oh God!” His transformation was complete: no more smoking or listening to music, and finally he could run without wheezing.

  The only things he truly missed were his mother, Malika, who, doting on her distant son, sent him plastic boxes of pastries from the family home in Riyadh when she discovered where he had gone, and his younger brother, Hesham, who he learned had become critically ill with testicular cancer.20

  But instead of returning home, Zubaydah volunteered for the front line in Gardez. That summer, Afghanistan became a darker place, as the realities of an irregular insurgency battered him, taking the lives of good friends. “Death walks with every person here like his own shadow, awake or asleep, even in a place of solitude or in the bathroom to do the necessary,” he wrote. “By God the ghost of death is feared.”

  In December 1991, it was Abu Zubaydah’s turn: a shrapnel injury to the head bringing his war to a sudden halt. It left him traumatized and unable to speak, write, or read, and he spent the next few months in a Peshawar hospital. Six months later, discharged but unable to fight, he volunteered to work as a logistics assistant for Ibn Sheikh, basing himself at the House of Martyrs.

  The Zubaydah diaries ran to six volumes and reached right up to the day before his eventual arrest. After reading them, Soufan now had no doubt that they had the right man and, watched over by the local C
IA team, who could not speak Arabic and so missed much of what was going on, he intensified his questioning, asking about Osama, his family, and Al Qaeda’s senior leadership.

  Who is Sheikh Saeed al-Masri?

  Where is Saad bin Laden?

  Who is Saif al-Adel?

  Zubaydah qualified his answers. He knew the head of Al Qaeda’s military committee, but as he had never served in Al Qaeda he could not be sure about Saif al-Adel’s’s duties.

  Soufan kept at it. One day, when he used a kunya for Saif that did not tally with the one in Soufan’s notebook, the agent asked a colleague to call up Saif’s photo from the FBI Most Wanted Terrorist list on his BlackBerry, to make sure they were talking about the same person. He handed the phone to Zubaydah while the image was still loading.

  “Tsk. That’s not him,” Zubaydah snapped, handing back the phone. “That’s Mokhtar.”

  Soufan looked at the screen and froze. “What?”

  Image 20, the photo he had intended for Zubaydah to study of “Saif al-Adel,” had not come up. Instead what had loaded was Image 5 on the FBI list: a man indicted for the 1996 Bojinka Plot in which terrorists planned to bring down twelve United States–bound aircraft over the Pacific. Here was a photo identified by the FBI as Khalid Shaikh Mohammad. But Zubaydah knew him by another name.

  Soufan felt fit to burst: “Mokhtar?” He hoped he could keep it bottled up. Stunned, he tried to keep his excitement hidden and let Abu Zubaydah continue.

  Mokhtar was an ethnic Pakistani, the injured prisoner revealed, but had grown up in Kuwait City. He was uncle to Ramzi Yousef, who was in an American jail. Surely the Americans knew all this already? Soufan nodded dumbly.